David Mills: Political ads are bad for you

David Mills / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It was like get­ting slugged ev­ery 10 min­utes. I was sit­ting in a small bar last night, work­ing on an ar­ti­cle and half-watch­ing the Pirates game, and ev­ery com­mer­cial break hit you with po­lit­i­cal ads of the us vs. them, good guys vs. bad guys, God’s on our side vs. ser­vants of Satan sort.

The Trump ads were all loud and an­gry. The Har­ris and Ca­sey ads were some­times loud and an­gry but more of­ten boast­ing and smug. But all pitched the elec­tion as a choice be­tween apoc­a­lyp­tic di­sas­ter and a sav­ior who would bring us a new and bet­ter Amer­ica.

Ex­ploit­ative ads

It makes you nos­tal­gic for the rel­a­tively se­date hair loss, fem­i­nine de­odor­ant and erec­tile dys­func­tion ads. These just want you to feel bad about your­self and worry that other peo­ple won’t like you, so that you’ll buy their prod­uct to fix your­self and make peo­ple like you more. (It’s not that easy.)

That kind of ad, a sta­ple of the Amer­i­can ad­ver­tis­ing in­dus­try, ex­ploits hu­man weak­ness, es­pe­cially fear, and ap­peals to the vices, es­pe­cially van­ity. They try to sell you some­thing by mak­ing you a worse hu­man be­ing.

The po­lit­i­cal ads do the same, only they make you an even worse hu­man be­ing than do the com­mer­cial ads. Not just dis­sat­is­fied with your­self, but an­gry at oth­ers, whom you must see with con­tempt, or maybe, if you’re nicer, pity.

This has, by the way, the ad­van­tage of mak­ing you less dis­sat­is­fied with your­self. You may have your faults, but at least you’re bet­ter than those peo­ple over there, those en­e­mies of de­moc­racy, the fam­ily, Amer­ica, etc.

The peo­ple who pay for these ads and the peo­ple they pay a lot of money to cre­ate them, they all want you to get an­gry and anx­ious about the fu­ture and see oth­ers as a threat to your well-be­ing. They want you des­per­ate to buy their prod­uct and des­per­ate to get the other prod­uct off the mar­ket.

The en­emy

And inevitably, the way the human mind works, the en­emy isn’t just the other can­di­date. It’s the other can­di­date’s sup­port­ers. If the other can­di­date so ex­em­pli­fies all that is wrong with Amer­ica, if that can­di­date is re­ally as bad as the ads claim, his or her sup­port­ers must be nearly as bad, or pos­si­bly worse.

If the can­di­date is Hitler, his fol­low­ers must be Na­zis. If the can­di­date is Sta­lin, her fol­low­ers must be com­mu­nists.

Or else they’re the cow­ardly sheep who don’t speak up and hope the ty­rants will go away and things will just improve, and thereby enable to tyrants to rule. Maybe some are just stu­pid or gull­ible, but that only mit­i­gates their guilt a lit­tle bit.

They should have known bet­ter, like the peo­ple who fell for the Ni­ge­rian prince scams. I knew, slightly, a psy­chi­a­trist who lost most of his sav­ings to an al­leg­edly royal in­ter­net scam­mer. He wasn’t stu­pid. Ex­cept that he was. Greed had made him stu­pid. Fear has the same effect. That’s why the ads try to scare you.

I as­sume the cam­paigns and the PACs aim these ads at swing vot­ers, but are there re­ally any swing vot­ers left whose vote will be changed by hear­ing that Kamala lies or that Trump’s a crim­i­nal?

Prob­a­bly very few peo­ple in Amer­ica are try­ing to de­cide what they think of the two. They know their an­swer, be­cause who couldn’t?

As I wrote a cou­ple months ago, the real swing vot­ers in this elec­tion are those who are swing­ing be­tween vot­ing for a can­di­date they don’t like and not vot­ing at all or vot­ing for some­one else as a pro­test.

I now think there’s an­other group of swing vot­ers: peo­ple al­most com­mit­ted to one can­di­date who feel nag­ging doubts about her or him. Vot­ers who nor­mally would never think about be­ing any­thing else than a Dem­o­crat or Re­pub­li­can.

The Dem­o­crat, for ex­am­ple, who liked Joe Biden but wor­ries that Kamala Har­ris is an am­bi­tious pol­i­ti­cian who doesn’t mean what she says or who’s good at pol­i­tics but not at gov­ern­ing, or a politician who means what she once said and not what she says now that she moves to the cen­ter. The Re­pub­li­can who likes Don­ald Trump but has got­ten tired of him play­ing the drama queen and now wor­ries that he’s not a good enough man to be pres­i­dent.

Maybe those people are in play and maybe there are enough of them to swing the election. I’m guessing they’re the targets of the ads. The rest of us just have to suffer.

Ray Werner’s an­swer

There’s no chang­ing this. People with vast amounts of money to spend think the ads work and they prob­a­bly do, alas.

Ray Werner, a pa­tri­arch of the Pitts­burgh the­atre, has one an­swer, not that any­one will do it. He once worked in ad­ver­tis­ing, he ex­plained in an ar­ti­cle pub­lished in this news­pa­per in 2015, and re­fused to cre­ate neg­a­tive ads. But of course oth­ers did.

He thought ad agen­cies should put their names on their ads. “If you’re an agency that loves to dam­age peo­ple’s rep­u­ta­tions with ven­om­ous com­mer­cials, put your name on them. ... Name call­ing with­out nam­ing who’s re­spon­si­ble just doesn’t seem, well, demo­cratic.”

It’s also a little slimy, I think. He thought, “You’d ei­ther change your tac­tics or get out of the busi­ness, you’d be so em­bar­rassed.”

But they wouldn’t be. Not with that much money to be made and a can­di­date to elect. Who cares what it does to Amer­ica? Who cares what it does to peo­ple?

David Mills’ previous column was “Donald Trump thinks God saved his life to make him president.”